the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

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on the club grounds, eager to gawk at a technology that was both as quaint
as a poodle skirt and as current as the NASA operations just down the
road. It wasn’t just a nostalgia trip, either; Sweeney brought with him that
day a model of the next- generation flying car that he was building using a
two- seater Lotus Elise.
At the time, Sweeney was among dozens of entrepreneurs, aircraft
engineers, private corporations, and even government agencies that continued
to chase the fanciful dream of a practical flying car for the masses—
a peculiarly American fascination that combines the relentless quest for
inde pendence with the sexy allure of dangerous new technology. The idea
of personal air transportation first entered popular culture at an aircraft
exposition in 1917, and by 1940 even Henry Ford was predicting the inevitability
of flying cars, saying, “Mark my words, a combination of airplane
and motorcar is coming. You may smile, but it will soon come.” The
technofantasy persisted in countless ways, from its cover treatment in Popu
lar Mechanics in February 1951, to its futuristic debut on The Jetsons
cartoon show in 1962, to the flying car in 1968’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
and the soaring midcentury Ford Anglia in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter
books and movies. It’s hard to imagine an American infatuation that has
proved more durable.
That durability, though, is what today makes the ongoing efforts to
build a practical flying car so—oh, how should we put this? Poignant?
Pointless? What other fantasy has been so steadily pursued and yet so
noticeably unfulfi lled for so long? The quest for flying cars has outlasted
nearly a century of progress as automobiles evolved from rickety contraptions
for the few to air bag–studded, fuel-efficient marvels for the masses.
It outlasted the evolution of airplanes from cloth-winged death traps into
flying buses where the most common aggravations are security checkpoints
and dull in-flight movies. There’s just something irresistible about
the idea of having it all: a home in some pastoral Eden, and a garaged car
that can carry you vast distances by air to an office in a teeming modern
metropolis or commercial center, then home again in time for dinner.